


Lost Things

by mowscannon



Series: When I Think Of My Future [2]
Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Colombia - Freeform, F/F, Inspired by Killing Eve (TV 2018), Post-Season/Series 03, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 15:33:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29860236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mowscannon/pseuds/mowscannon
Summary: Villanelle and Eve have parted ways after their time together in Prague. Will they see each other again? They grapple with their choices and their past, trying to understand what a future can look like.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Series: When I Think Of My Future [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2176485
Comments: 10
Kudos: 41





	1. Rain

_Medellín, Colombia_

_March 5th_

_Villanelle_

Torrential spring rain blew against Villanelle in sheets as she sped around traffic on her motorcycle through the winding mountain highway toward the city. It was dark; night had fallen, and the air was filled with the sensual perfume of the jungle—a smell like sand, cologne and rain, intoxicating and rich. She squeezed past a van to its right, on the shoulder of the road, then wove to the left of a taxi and accelerated forward away from the halo of spray being thrown up by its tires, tearing along the wet asphalt toward the empty highway in front of her. The headlight of her motorcycle caught a bright yellow traffic sign depicting a cougar crossing, which flashed in front of her eyes and then quickly disappeared into the darkness and mist.

When she arrived at her apartment in the city, she leaped off of her bike and hurriedly ducked into the shelter of the small entry, fumbling to remove her wet helmet and retrieve her keys from her jacket pocket. She entered the darkness of the narrow foyer, which held her mailbox and the steep staircase that led to her apartment. To the left, her landlord’s door and the downstairs apartment behind it were silent and unmoving. She shook her head. The top of her hair, dyed dark brown, was dry, but the ends were soaked where they had hung out the back of her helmet, no doubt coated with muck thrown up by the wheels of her motorcycle. She uttered a noise of annoyance, running her fingers through it, then jogged up the stairs and unlocked the door to her flat.

As she entered, the room lit white and blue with a flash of lightning, followed by a deep crack of thunder. The spring rain pounded against the roof, and as she stepped into the flat and began to turn on lights, she saw that water was leaking from the farthest window and running down the wall to puddle on the cool tile floor.

“ _Mierda,”_ she muttered, going to the closet to retrieve a towel, which she shoved unceremoniously under the window to soak up the worst of the puddle. She stripped out of her motorcycle leathers, hanging them to dry, then, removing her muddy boots, placed them by the front door.

Her flat was simple and clean. There was an open sitting room containing nothing but a coffee table and a low futon. To the left of the entrance was a tiny bathroom and what was passing as her bedroom. To the right was a kitchen with a two-burner gas stove and a sliver of a window. The reason she had chosen the spot, however, was the balcony that ran the length of the outside of the apartment and culminated in a large covered patio with a view of the neighborhood. It contained low wooden benches covered in colorful cushions that circled the patio.

It was warm, a humid spring evening. She removed the rest of her clothes, damp from sweating underneath her motorcycle gear, until her smooth body was completely naked, then tied her hair back into a high ponytail and padded barefoot into the kitchen. There was a large clear bottle of aguardiente on the counter. She took it up and unscrewed the cap, poured herself a small glass, and took the glass with her out onto the balcony.

The liqueur, sharp with overtones of anise, burned her tongue and the insides of her nostrils, warming her further. Every part of her body felt sticky with the humidity.

She hated it here. She hated Colombia. She loathed the wetness of the air, the leering looks that men gave her, the raucous noise of parakeets arguing amongst themselves in the morning. But she didn’t hate it as much as she had hated Canada.

She sighed, looking out at the neighborhood through the watery darkness from her second-floor perch. The buildings were lit with multi-colored lights, green, purple and red. Distant music floated toward her. There were muffled shouts and laughter from corner stores and rooftop bars nearby. The guttural roar of an engine passing on the street below.

“ _No te vayas, no te vayas!”_ someone called to their friend as they exited a bar, then the sounds receded into chuckles and indistinguishable conversation.

She had landed in Canada first. Somehow it had seemed to make sense to her, going to Quebec. She knew that they spoke French, and she always wanted to speak French. Canada was also huge, and she needed somewhere large to disappear for a while, to be anonymous. The first night, she had checked into a hostel and looked in the mirror.

Her bruised eye had begun to turn an awful shade of bright red. Her lip was still swollen, and her whole face had pounded with uncomfortable pain on the nine-hour flight as the air pressure changed, leaving her unable to sleep. She had looked like a mess, but still looked like Villanelle. She would look like Villanelle wherever she went. She had suddenly itched to do something drastic like cutting up her own face. How did you cut out the person that you once were? She could claw off her clothes, but her skin would still linger. Why couldn’t she start over? Why? She wanted another chance, a choice to grab at.

Frenetically, she had prowled the neighborhood around the hostel until she found a place to buy hair dye, then had dyed her hair in the hostel bathroom back to an old shade, a dark brown—the closest thing she could manage to becoming a new person. The hostel manager had yelled at her for the mess—the dark dye had stained her hands and the countertop next to the sink.

She had only stayed in Canada for four days. It reminded her too much of Russia. She had forgotten December in a northern climate. The dry cold winds, the high snowbanks, the whirls of deicing salt coating foyers and climbing up the legs of pants. She had lain for four days on her hostel bed, ignoring the other travelers and staring at the ceiling, willing her face and her arm to heal.

Eve. Eve. Eve.

She hadn’t been able to think about anything else. Had Eve made it back to London? Was she safe? Was she being tortured at this moment, her long fingernails being pulled out by a leering man in a dank cellar?

Villanelle was constantly tormented by these thoughts. They leapt at her like a dog that grabbed her by the neck and shook her when she least expected it.

She had left Canada as suddenly as she came, headed immediately for a warmer climate. She had gone to the mountains of Colombia, and here she had been for almost four months.

She tossed back the rest of her glass and went inside to the kitchen. There were store-bought arepas in the fridge. She could heat one up in a pan on the stove. She could eat one cold. It didn’t matter. She set the glass on the counter a little too aggressively. Her whole naked body itched with impatience and dissatisfaction.

It had been too long. She needed to contact Eve. The initial shock of Villanelle’s flight from Europe had worn off, and now a kind of grief had taken hold of her that she had never experienced before.

Thinking about Eve made her physically sick. Whole days would pass when she had convinced herself that Eve was dead, and then she would wear black and starve herself and sit by the toilet with her head against the basin of the sink in case she threw up. Other days, she snapped out of it and walked endless circuits in the streets, eating chicken empanadas from street vendors as she mentally ran through dozens of ideas on how to contact Eve safely.

There came a patterned knock on her front door— _tap-tap-tap knock-knock_ —and Villanelle turned from the kitchen to take her robe from a hook by her bedroom. She wrapped herself up and yanked open the front door.

“ _Que sorpresa, Julián,”_ she said sarcastically to the twelve-year-old boy standing on the landing.

“Hi,” he replied, sidling past her into the apartment, ducking under her arm even as she rolled her eyes. He knew that if she did not want to see him, she would not have answered the door. His dark hair was straight and growing past his ears. His cheeks were round. His brown eyes twinkled with humor and intelligence. Tonight he was wearing a faded red tank top and blue soccer shorts. He, too, was barefoot.

She shut the door behind him and walked into the kitchen.

“ _¿Quiéres una arepa?”_ she called behind her.

“I want two arepas,” he responded. She poked her head around the doorframe and frowned at him.

“Too bad. You get one. Can you not speak Spanish with me for five minutes?”

He mimicked crying as he sat down on the floor next to the coffee table, pulling a deck of cards out of his pocket and beginning to lay them out at the table.

“ _Chinga! Yo necesito practicar inglés también._ Your Spanish sounds like crap,” he replied.

Villanelle retreated back into the kitchen with a weak smile, turned on the gas line to the stove and started heating the tortillas. The Colombian accent had been oddly difficult for her to pick up and imitate. She spoke her Spanish like a European, with long vowels and clipped words. In Colombia the words slurred together, the sentences rose and fell like a drumline. She liked to sit in cabs and listen to the cab drivers talk, to try to absorb the rhythm of their speech. Still, her language skills were sharp and hungry—she had learned the slang and mannerisms that she needed to get by immediately.

She brought the plate of warm arepas into the living room and placed them next to Julián’s cards. He had dealt out five-card draw, and they played for a moment silently while they swallowed mouthfuls of the arepas, which were filled with a soft white cheese and sprinkled with cinnamon on the outside. Julián was her landlord’s youngest son, and her only friend. He swallowed his last bite and slapped his hand down on the table when she took the first hand, cursing.

" _¡Juemadre!”_

 _“Tu madre,”_ Villanelle replied with satisfaction, though the retort made little sense, and took the cards to deal again.

“You’re not sad today,” Julián noted.

“No,” Villanelle replied simply. “Not today.”

“Where was you today?”

“Where _were_ you,” Villanelle corrected.

“ _Bueno, maldita,_ where _were_ you?”

“The airport.”

“The airport? Why!”

“I was thinking about leaving your little stinky ass behind and never coming back.”

Villanelle had actually spent the last two days at the airport, sitting outside of security and waiting to hear someone speak English. For the past several weeks she had been holding onto a postcard for Eve. It was addressed to the address of Bitter Pill, which she had found easily online. She thought that even if Eve no longer went there, Jamie might be the only person who knew where she was. It was the only possible connection that she had to Eve’s whereabouts. The postcard was just a colorful pattern on one side, without any details that might give away Villanelle’s location. Her hang-up, the reason she had held onto the card for so long, was that she didn’t want the note being postmarked in the mail from Mendellín. So, eventually, she had lurked at the airport until she had finally heard a couple speaking English, and quickly asked them where they were going.

“San Antonio. Texas,” they had answered, surprised.

Perfect.

Although the couple was confused at first, Villanelle told them that it was just a little game that she and her girlfriend liked to play. Would they stamp it and drop it in a mailbox, any mailbox, once they got home? It was such a simple and effortless request, that, amused, the couple had agreed.

“If you leave me,” Julián replied, “you will never know what happens to Harry Potter.”

“They have Harry Potter in other countries, stupid.”

Julián scoffed.

“ _Yo sé,”_ he mumbled, in a manner that made Villanelle think he had not, in fact, known that.

There was a moment of silence as they considered their cards.

“Ok, but,” Villanelle finally said, “seriously—can I borrow the next book?”

In the morning she was woken again by Julián’s sharp patterned knock on her door, their code, followed by her favorite sentence:

“ _Desayuno de mamá!”_

Breakfast.

She threw off her white sheet and clambered into her clothes, high-waisted denim shorts and a loose white button-up blouse with long sleeves. She tied her hair into a low bun as she quickly hurried down the stairs to the apartment below. Food was not a part of her housing arrangement, but whenever the urge took hold of her landlady, she was invited down to partake in whatever was being had. Villanelle did not question these whims.

When she had shown up at their place, inquiring about the upstairs apartment from an ad, the family had taken one look at her thin tired face with its fading bruises and clearly decided that she was hiding from an abusive boyfriend. Villanelle was happy to let them think that, and Julián was the only one who knew otherwise. She would let them think anything for a home cooked Colombian breakfast.

The interior of the downstairs was painted a brilliant pale blue, and the screenless windows were thrown wide open to the warm and sunny morning. Across the street, she could see two old men sitting in chairs outside the front of the convenience store, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. The large rectangular dining table in the center of the front room was loaded with food, and Julián’s father sat reading a newspaper in a white t-shirt. He grunted at Villanelle in recognition as she arrived. Julián was already stuffing scrambled eggs into his face, standing by one of the open windows, watching the street.

“ _Buenos días, Lili,”_ Julián’s mother greeted from the kitchen, calling Villanelle by the name she had given them. Liliana Silva, a young designer who had recently inherited a little bit of money from her mother’s death and was quietly recovering in private from a bad relationship. They assumed.

“ _Buenos días, Señora Castañeda,”_ Villanelle replied politely, seating herself at the table and looking at the spread eagerly. She turned her eyes up to the large figurine of Jesus on the cross that hung on the wall opposite the table. “ _Señor,”_ she added to him, equally as polite, narrowing her eyes and giving it a nod.

Eggs. Rice. Pinto beans, oddly spicy. Pork so chewy that she almost couldn’t swallow it. A fruit whose name she did not know, sour and sweet at the same time. Villanelle tried not to shovel her food as quickly as the twelve-year-old who still stood at the window, his fork now dangling from his fingers as he eavesdropped on the neighbors.

Julián’s mother approached and placed a cup of coffee in front of Villanelle. Normally Villanelle did not drink much coffee, but in Colombia coffee was thick with milk and sweetened to the point where it did not taste or feel like coffee anymore. It reminded Villanelle of hot chocolate. She sipped at it happily. This breakfast would make it hard for her to work out.

When she left the building an hour later, the Castañedas’ eldest son was standing outside, leaning against the entrance of the building and smoking a cigarette. Diego Castañeda was Villanelle’s age and annoyingly handsome. His generous black hair, straight like Julián’s, was slicked back. He oozed an air of unearned confidence despite being slightly shorter than Villanelle, and looked at her through thick eyelashes over a thin nose as she exited the building in her gym clothes. He gave a low whistle.

“ _No me hables de momento, Diego,”_ Villanelle said, rolling her eyes. _Don’t talk to me right now._

“I don’t hit my women,” he called at her in a thick accent.

“No?” Villanelle retorted. “I do, sometimes. But only when they ask.” She winked at him and left him puzzling over this response with his limited English.

She jogged to the park. The air was still light with morning warmth, not humid yet. She went down a very steep hill and was afforded a view of the sky and the mountains behind it. Enormous cumulus clouds piled up over the city, looking like impossibly huge mountains themselves. They seemed to explode out of the blue sky like a punch in the face. Dark birds with long necks flew pointedly overhead, winging toward the distant sea. Crickets the size of half of her hand clung to chain link fences and thin branches.

At the park, people exercised on the public equipment and children ran underfoot, shrieking and kicking a soccer ball. Villanelle tried to ignore them, going to a steel bar and stretching her arms before doing a few experimental pull-ups. Her left arm was much, much better. After all these weeks, the scar on the back of her forearm from being attacked in Prague had almost faded, just a bright white line against her tanning skin. The muscle underneath her more serious injury, the stab to her bicep, was finally starting to feel strong again.

She did ten pull-ups, stopped, and looked at the children. They were small, barely seven years old. She watched their delicate footwork with the soccer ball with interest. It was incredible, the finesse with which their feet and hips moved. The control.

She wondered what sport she would have played as a child. She drew a blank, watching their deft feet roll and spin the ball. Dasha had always told her that she was too tall and too fat for gymnastics, a disappointment. And earlier, at the orphanage, if they even had a ball it was popped and deflated within a week. Instead of relying on undependable equipment, they had played long and complex versions of a vicious tag.

It wasn’t a tag to be caught in. If you were the hunted and the other children grasped the edge of your shirt, it was time for a heated and frantic struggle. The tearing of collars and seams. If you landed on the ground, you might be kicked, your fingers stepped on. They might sit on you until you couldn’t breathe. Villanelle had quickly learned to be the kicker and not the kicked.

Once, at the age of eight, she had been caught by the sleeve and pinned to the yellowing grass and dirt. Struggling frantically, she finally took a deep breath, collapsed her body and slipped herself out of her polo shirt entirely. She had wriggled up from the sparse grass and run away towards the woods as fast as she could.

She had come back hours later, as the sun was setting. Her skinny arms were crossed over her naked chest, and she was shivering. She had been hit, anyway, by the matrons. For coming back naked. For leaving. For coming back at all. She didn’t know. There were the bruises on her arms from the fingers of the children and the bruises on her cheeks from the fingers of the matrons and it didn’t really matter. People had begun to blend together in her mind into a horrible herd of mindless and violent cows.

Maybe she could have played soccer.

Villanelle watched the children with a stone in her stomach as she worked out, and when the ball accidentally came to her feet, she grinned at them in delight.

She kicked it as hard as she could into the thick jungle of trees surrounding the park.

“Oops,” she said, frowning at them. “ _Lo siento. No juego el fútbol.”_

_Russia, 2001_

~~_Villanelle_ ~~

_Oksana_

Oksana woke in the night to a slight pressure on her cot. For a moment she thought that it was another child trying to climb into bed with her. Sometimes the new ones tried, lonely and desperate and cold, because they saw the other kids sharing their beds and Oksana was alone. They learned quickly that Oksana hissed and pinched like an angry cat, would tolerate their presence for brief hours and then wake them up with a savage bite to the back of the neck. She opened her eyes.

Thin moonlight flooded into the dormitory from the clear cold night, and the outlines of the beds were grainy and rife with shadows. The other children slept deeply. It was a ragged chorus of stuffed noses and whimperings. For once, no one was crying out in their sleep.

If anyone else saw the woman sitting on the edge of Oksana’s bed, they kept quiet.

Oksana did not jolt at the unusual sight. Her pupils dilated in the dim light and she breathed steadily through her nostrils as she rolled under the blanket to face the dark figure whose face was barely visible in the insufficient light. She smelled unfamiliar, like laundry detergent, makeup, and the outdoors.

The woman held a finger up to her lips, though Oksana had no intention of crying out. The woman had a small frame and wore a thick overcoat with a big bag of some kind over one shoulder, out of which she drew a softly rustling package. Oksana smelled plastic and her nostrils flared as she peered closer.

It was a large piece of cake rolled in plastic wrap. The woman held the slice close enough for Oksana to see it in the darkness, the other hand still holding a finger against her own mouth. Then the finger twitched away from her mouth and she gestured casually toward the door. Oksana pushed her blanket aside and folded herself over the side of her bed to dig for her shoes, which were stowed underneath. She followed the woman down the narrow central aisle out of the dormitory, stepping lightly on the balls of her feet so that the bare arches did not touch the stinging cold of the hardwood floors, her shoes dangling from her fingers.

They passed stealthily down the hallway of the orphanage, creaked down the stairs, and went through a side door to the yard. The cold slapped at Oksana’s thin clothes and bare feet. She bent down to tug her shoes, sockless, onto her feet (too small, the shoes were always too small), wriggling to get the worn sneakers over a sockless foot as her thin blonde hair fell into her eyes. She let out a compressed shiver, a frustrated expulsion of air, and—miraculously—the woman pulled a fuzzy pink zip-up jacket out of the large bag at her side and handed it to Oksana.

Oksana snatched it without question and pulled it on.

The grounds were pale and bare in the moonlight, and the forest that waited on the edge of the property was dark and grim. Oksana tried to look closer at the woman as she followed her to a small bench that rested against the side of the cement block building.

The woman was very small and had dark, slightly curling hair that peeked out from a warm cap on her head, her bangs falling almost to her eyes. Her nose was arched and she had a heavy-lidded gaze, her lower lip pouting toward Oksana as if to suggest suspicion.

She held out the plastic-wrapped cake again.

Oksana took the cake as they sat next to each other, feverishly unwrapping it with her cold fingers. It was chocolate. The icing stuck to the wrapping as she peeled it away, and she licked that off first. She hummed.

“Who are you?” she finally asked. She hadn’t seen cake in years.

“My name is Dasha,” the woman replied, spreading her legs and resting her elbows on her knees. Oksana was only nine, but she wasn’t that much smaller than this woman.

Oksana bit into the cake and her eyes squeezed shut. The sugar hit her, almost rocked her back. She swallowed it without chewing, breathed through her nose and inhaled the rich scent, then bit again.

“Do you like it?” Dasha asked.

Oksana nodded, her mouth full, but did not make eye contact.

“I like you,” Dasha followed. Oksana frowned at her, licking thick frosting from the side of her lip. Her mouth felt dry. She was dehydrated.

“I don’t know you,” she managed.

“But I know you, Oksana. I’m proud of you,” Dasha replied. Oksana paused from her feast in confusion. “You’re special.”

“How?”

“I thought it was funny when you stabbed that girl in the eye with a pencil last year.”

Oksana sat up straight as she shoved the last bite of cake into her mouth, being careful to wipe her fingers against the rough cold wall behind her instead of on her pink coat.

“You know about that?” she fumbled around her mouthful.

“Why did you do it?”

Oksana swallowed, but the sugar coated her throat thickly and she had to cough.

“She tried to steal it.”

“Steal what?”

“My pencil.”

Dasha laughed, a loud and sharp bark in the quiet night.

“You stabbed her because she stole your pencil?”

“She _tried_ ,” Oksana hissed, gripping her knees with her dirty fingers. “It was my favorite pencil. I told her she could have it if she _really_ wanted it.”

There was a moment of quiet, then Dasha agreed.

“She made her choice.” An amazing thing happened. Dasha withdrew another piece of cake from her shoulder bag. ~~Villanelle~~ Oksana’s hand jerked toward it involuntarily, but rather than to punish Oksana for it, Dasha handed the slice over. ~~Villanelle~~ Oksana took it and began to eat it unceremoniously. She hadn’t had cake in years. Even before the orphanage she rarely had cake. She didn’t have to chew it; it melted in her mouth. When she closed her eyes, the sugar looked like fireworks behind her eyelids. She took a shuddering breath through her nose.

“If you did something for me,” Dasha said, her voice soft in the thin air, “you could have all the cake you wanted. A bigger bed. I could buy you clothes. Books. Makeup.”

Oksana wondered how the woman knew all of the things she liked to steal.

“I could take you away and you would never see this place again,” Dasha continued.

“What kind of thing?” she asked, her voice thick with chocolate.

“You would have to do it exactly as I tell you. It’s a kind of test. If you do anything different at all, I won’t come for you.”

“Would I see my family again?”

“No.”

“Good,” Oksana replied, finishing the second piece of cake. “I hate them.”

“I know.”

“What should I do?”

“You know Ludmila?”

“She pees her bed.”

“So do you.”

Oksana looked sharply at Dasha, her muscles jumping under her skin, her fingers sticky with cake. She didn’t notice a high-pitched hiss escape from between her lips. Dasha pressed on.

“I want you to kill her. Then you need to light the dormitory on fire. Not a small one. The whole top floor should burn down.”

“Why?”

Dasha’s bony hand flew out of the darkness and stung ~~Villanelle~~ Oksana across the face.

“You don’t ask why.”

Oksana sat back, rage flaring in her stomach, but her face was stony and didn’t betray emotion. They sat quietly for a moment, then Dasha drew a third piece of cake from her bag. Oksana looked at it in disbelief. Her stomach was tight and throbbing from the food, but she still wanted it.

“Repeat it,” Dasha said quietly.

“Kill Ludmila. Burn up the dormitory. You’ll come for me.”

“Yes,” Dasha hissed with pleasure. “But only if you do it exactly as I say.”

In the early morning, Oksana woke up vomiting thick brown puke onto her pillow. It was everywhere, in her hair, in her mouth. She whined and called for her mother, disoriented. No one moved or responded. No one made fun of her for crying out. They all did it, at some point. Cried for their mothers, that is.


	2. Ice

_ London, England _

_ March 11th _

_ Eve _

__

Eve and Jamie had drunk far, far too much scotch. Eve, especially, being so much smaller than Jamie, was becoming untenably drunk. It had started like this:

An unseasonably late ice storm had hit London. Cold rain over the weekend had met the dropping temperatures and turned into freezing rain by early Monday morning. The streets had quickly turned slick and impassible, and any trees that had put out hopeful buds in early March were punished disastrously with thick sleeves of dripping ice that dragged unfortunate branches down until they collapsed from the weight, splitting horrible wounds into the sides of beautiful old trunks. Power lines sagged. Businesses shut down as people were unable to commute to work.

Jamie and Eve lived together in Jamie’s flat, and they had holed up with what they could get from a treacherous walk to the corner shop – bags of crisps, ice cream, beer, cigarettes, canned soup—they grabbed everything that looked fun and combined it with the meager store that was already in the cupboards. It was a kind of odd holiday, being stuck at home, and Eve had quite stupidly forgotten her flash drive at the Bitter Pill office, so she couldn’t work at all.

They had been living together since shortly after Eve arrived back in London, stunned and a little terrified, from Prague in December. On the whole drive from Prague to Dresden, through the rolling brown winter countryside, Eve had been a knot of shock and panic. She had held her stomach with one arm as she drove as if her guts were going to fall out onto her lap. She had felt like a tapestry that was being unraveled thread-by-thread, the choicest parts of her being stolen away. Confusion had beat at her. 

How had Villanelle found the man she had killed? Was he really the person she thought he was? Would Eve ever see Villanelle again? How had everything changed so fast?

But a week after Eve’s arrival in London, her nerves had calmed. Once the astonishment of Villanelle’s sudden flight had ebbed, things felt oddly normal to Eve. This was how things went with them. They saw each other for intense periods of time, then didn’t for long and empty months. Eve had not, actually, done anything illegal or wrong. She didn’t know anything. No one came for her, no one tried to speak to her. Eventually, money had poured in from Joseph Menzil, and Eve had more funds than she had ever had in her life. True to her word, she had put aside Villanelle’s share in a separate account, then split her own share with Jamie and Bear despite their surprised protests. It was more than half a year’s salary for someone like Bear. For Eve, it allowed her to finally break her lease at her old, horrible studio apartment, dispose of the majority of her belongings, and move in with Jamie.

It worked well for the two of them. They were both bachelors, after all. Well, divorcees. They were also both introverts, independent and cerebral, so they were unbothered by long periods of silence when they closed themselves into their respective rooms and got lost in the internet. At the same time, they had enough in common that it was delightful to sink into arguments over a television show, women they saw on the street, a story Jamie was pursuing, or their own sordid and personal backstories.

Tonight, after days of being cooped up in the flat, they were slumped at the coffee table with the television blaring. Jamie was on the couch, leaning back with his greying beard pointing up at the ceiling, his spectacles reflecting the flickering images on the screen. Eve was collapsed over the surface of the table amid highball glasses and discarded pens and paper, her arms stretched forward toward the edge of the table. They had been watching Countdown reruns and playing a drinking game. The scraps of paper were covered in scribbles of letters and numbers.

“I’m way too drunk to play another round,” Eve groaned, spreading her fingers and knocking her forehead against the table. Her dark curls were pulled back out of her face, and they were both in pajamas.

“You’ve said that three times already,” Jamie reminded her, lowering his gaze from the ceiling to shake his head at her. “I always forget that you can’t hold your liquor.”

Eve’s head shot up from the table, and she whipped around to look at him.

“I can!” she exclaimed, though her head was swimming, and she kept blinking. “I can hold my liquor! I can do anything…” she finished stubbornly, her chin drifting toward her collarbone.

Jamie laughed out loud. He was also drunk, though not as groggy.

“Anything?” he asked.

“I…I have done a lot of things,” Eve replied, her lips heavy. A sudden weight seemed to fall over her chest. Her forehead pounded, and she wanted to cry. She knew she was drunk, but she desperately wanted to say things, a lot of things, quite suddenly.

“If I can do what I have done, I can do anything,” Eve mumbled.

Jamie grinned at her a little, his eyes also slightly fogged over.

“I still want to hear about these ‘things’ you’re always darkly mentioning,” he chuckled.

Eve became gravely serious, swiveled on the floor to face him, and stared.

“No!” she exclaimed suddenly, “Too dangerous.”

“Villanelle, hm?” he asked. Eve’s brown eyes fluttered closed at the name, then opened again rapidly. An uninvited terror suddenly started to yawn around her like a great dark hole. Her arms crossed themselves, gripping at her sides, her fingernails pinching into her skin through her t-shirt, trying to ground herself.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, her mind blank with alcohol and panic. “You can’t be here!”

“What?” Jamie asked, his mouth twitching in confusion.

Eve lurched up from the floor and started to yank at Jamie to pull him up from the couch. He didn’t resist at first, climbing to his feet and following Eve as she tugged him by his hand toward the entrance to the flat.

“Wait,” he said as she started to open the front door, “What the hell are you doing?”

“It’s not safe! I’m so stupid!” Eve cried out. “Bill, then Kenny! Niko! Now you! You’re my best friend!”

“Eve, hold on…”

“They’ll come for you, they’ll kill you, you…” Eve was pushing on him now, leaning her body weight against him to try to shove him out of the open door of the flat, and he began to laugh.

“Eve! What are you doing?”

Her small body was making no headway as she put her palms against his chest and weakly gave a desperate thrust. Jamie was much larger than her, and he leaned back against her as her small feet slipped against the hardwood floor in her socks.

“Eve,” Jamie said again, “I’m in my boxers.” He continued laughing, and they leaned against each other in the doorway, both struggling against the others’ bodyweight, Eve’s feet scrabbling around for traction as she pathetically attempted to push him out of his own apartment.

“But what if you die?” Eve gave a dry, drunken sob, the scotch burning in her throat.

“Everyone dies,” Jamie replied, rolling his eyes, and he finally pushed her into the flat and closed the door. Eve leaned her back against the wall, swaying slightly, then closed her eyes and slowly slid down until she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chest. She heard Jamie’s heavy footsteps move away. There was a light clattering from the kitchen and the sound of the tap running. She opened her eyes when he returned. He carefully sat next to her, a tall glass of water in one hand and a can of Pringles in the other.

They ate in silence for a moment, Eve shoving an entire palmful of Pringles into her mouth and chewing grumpily.

“We really need to eat when we drink scotch,” Jamie said thickly. Eve sighed, slumping even more. “Here—" he handed her the glass of water, and she threw her head back and drank the whole thing.

“Do you want to talk?” he finally asked. Eve groaned and set the empty glass onto the floor between them.

“It’s kind of hard when the only person that I need to talk to has disappeared off the face of the earth,” she replied petulantly.

“You miss talking to her?” he asked kindly. Eve opened her mouth, then closed it again, grimacing. Her nose wrinkled and she blearily looked Jamie in the face.

“You know…” she said, “actually, she is really fucking annoying to talk to.”

Jamie laughed.

“Do you think  _ she _ wants to talk to  _ you _ ?” he asked.

“Yes,” Eve replied instantly, nodding her head. “It’s probably killing her, she…God, Jamie, you should see her face when I walk into a room, it’s like…” Eve made a lazy, expansive gesture with her hands, “…she just lights up.” Her voice dropped to a drunken whisper. “She is so focused, it’s like every…part…of…every bit of her body is focused on me, it’s like being a deer in headlights, it’s so intense. Like…” Eve leaned toward Jamie, one palm against the floor to steady herself. “Okay, I’m drunk but I have to tell you something, Jamie…it’s so intense I feel like I can  _ feel _ when she is thinking about me even when we’re not in the same room.” She tapped her forehead with a finger. “She doesn’t need to  _ say _ stuff for me to know what she means. I just know.”

Eve stopped talking, realizing that she was rambling and having no memory of why she was on the subject. Jamie stared at her through his glasses, a bit cross-eyed.

“What?” Eve asked, self-consciously.

“Is she good in bed?” Jamie asked, grinning. Eve gasped and pushed at his shoulder playfully.

“Jamie!” she exclaimed. He spread his hands innocently.

“What? It’s a fair question.”

Eve reached for the can of Pringles again and shoved several into her mouth.

“Yeah,” she admitted, her cheek full. “Honestly? So much fun.”

“Fun?”

“Like a fuckin’…like a fuckin’…” Eve’s mind swam around, searching for the right analogy. “…amusement park,” she finally mumbled around the crisps in her mouth. Jamie burst out laughing, and Eve started to choke on the Pringles a little as she suppressed her own laugh.

“An amusement park?” Jamie hollered, slapping his knees. Eve could feel her face turning red from silent laughter. She tried to take a breath through her nose, but choked and then coughed, spraying crisps onto the floor.

“Fuck!” She and Jamie were now laughing so hard that they were on their hands and knees. His back shook and his glasses fell off the end of his nose.

“Endless…” Eve tried to continue, gasping, “Endless rides!”

They howled.

The next morning, the ice had melted and the city started to wake again, grumbling through a morning routine. 

The Bitter Pill office, once the heat was turned on, was like a warm and dry womb where everyone could curl up and be companionably silent near each other. Rain continued to fall outside, but the indoors felt warm and safe under the fluorescent lights. 

Eve stared at her laptop, trying to read the words that swam in front of her aching eyes. She let her lids fall shut and leaned back into her chair, rubbing a palm over her eyelids. She felt endlessly thirsty from drinking so much the night before despite being armed with a bottle of water, a cup of black coffee and three ibuprofen. She was determined to revive herself by the afternoon because Thursdays were pub quiz days, and she needed to last until at least 10pm to be of use to the Bitter Pill team.

Audrey pushed through the door to the office, her arms full, covered in a sheen of rain. Everyone rose as she came in because she was carrying precious cargo: a box of pastries, the lid of the box wrinkled with water. Eve hung at the back of the group, trying not to crowd as Audrey deposited the box onto a counter near the coffee pot, sniffling from the cool and damp outside air, her reddish hair sparkling with clinging raindrops. From the corner of Eve’s eye she could see Jamie stand in his glass-fronted cubicle, his eyes widening at the sight of the box of pastries. He waved at Eve and tried to motion for her to bring him one. She flashed an evil, unpromising smile at him.

“You’re an angel,” Bear said to Audrey as he pulled the lid of the box back. “An angel, have I told you that?”

“You tell me that every time I bring food,” Audrey replied, stepping back and clumsily trying to remove her jacket with her purse and a handful of wrinkled office mail still in one hand.

Eve squeezed up to the counter and stole a croissant from the box gratefully, padding back toward her desk with new life in her step, the light and buttery smell giving her renewed hope for the success of her day. She sank into her desk chair and took a bite, groaning. She heard a loud knocking and looked up to see Jamie tapping incredulously at the glass of his cubicle, gesturing toward the kitchenette. She shrugged at him and he widened his eyes meaningfully.

“Sorry, baby,” she mumbled through the flaky layers. 

“Eve, you have mail!” Audrey’s voice cut through Eve’s breakfast reverie. Eve looked up, uncomprehending. She swallowed.

“Um. Is it a medical bill?” Eve and Niko were in a complicated process of divesting their accounts, made sordid by selling their house and both of their emergency hospitalizations in the past year. She wondered how they had thought to find her at this business address, but Audrey was shaking her head as she walked over to Eve, holding out a thin piece of card.

“Thanks,” Eve said, accepting it. She scanned the card’s front, baffled. It was a bright tessellated pattern of green, blue and yellow chevrons without any text. “Huh.” She flipped it over, and on the back, scrawled next to her name and the address of Bitter Pill’s office block, was a single sentence.

_Don’t make piroshki without me. x_

__

Eve’s hands went numb. She stared at the x, a thin and fluid thing.

“Oh my god,” Eve heard herself say. Her heart leapt against her chest suddenly, and she suppressed the urge to throw up as blood rushed up her neck and into her face. A cry left her mouth, a type of squeal, and she clutched the card with both hands against her face quickly, then collapsed forward onto the desk, breathing heavily.

“Eve?” someone asked, the sound coming into her ears distantly.

Long-suppressed feelings threatened to burst from her abdomen in an abrupt cascade. Her fingers trembled against the desk and her shoulders shook. A wave of relief squeezed her so tightly that she could not breathe.

“Oh my god,” she said again, her voice choked. The feeling grew so intense that her body could not contain it. She lifted her head slightly and smacked her forehead against the desk so that a white light burst behind her closed eyes.

“Eve!” she heard again, more urgently this time, thick with concern, and cool fingers gripped her head, inserting themselves between her face and the desk. She did not respond. She heard a muttering and whispering around her, and then her name said again more sternly, by Jamie. Eve lifted her head from the desk, taking a deep breath.

“She’s alive,” she said, her voice thick. She spat out a curl of brown hair that was stuck in the corner of her mouth. “Fuck. She’s alive.”

Jamie’s furrowed brow came into her field of vision as he knelt in front of her. They made eye contact.

“Are you okay?” he asked cautiously. 

“It’s her birthday,” Eve whispered. Jamie straightened and waved all the onlookers away with a sharp gesture, rolling his eyes meaningfully. When they had shuffled away from the scene, he turned back to Eve.

He smiled.

“Happy Birthday, Villanelle.”

They had lost the pub quiz badly, but the mood at the table was cheerful. The team of five crowded into a corner table at the pub, three of them squeezing into the curved booth upholstered in threadbare velvet and the other two seated in wooden chairs on the opposite end of the circular table. The surface of the table was sticky and crowded with both their empty and half-drunk pints. Their faces were flushed with the heat of the pub, and with the joy of being with friends and coworkers after long days of isolation during the ice storm. A heady sense of general release floated through the pub. Even the bartenders, usually grim and rude, laughed loudly and smiled.

“I’m not even mad,” Bear was saying, a pout on his round face. “I don’t know shit about Everton. Who cares about Everton? Everton?!”

“Give it up,” Jamie said, and Eve flapped her hand in support. “We’re never going to know football.”

There was a moment of silence as everyone at the table thought about Kenny. Eve lifted her glass, and they all seemed to know what she meant, raising their own pints in solidarity and drinking. Heads nodded, glasses clinked.

“I have another toast,” Jamie added. “Happy Birthday!”

Everyone grinned and lifted their pints up high. Eve blushed, but she raised her own glass to meet the others.

“ _ Sláinte!”  _ Bear called, finishing his ale. He slammed his empty glass on the table and pointed at Eve’s. “Another, birthday girl?” he asked her. Everyone knew it wasn’t Eve’s birthday, but they were celebrating with her as if it were. It was a joyous conjunction of events: the disappearance of the treacherous ice. Villanelle’s birthday. The confirmation of her life.

“Smithwick’s, please,” Eve confirmed, raising herself from the table. She strolled outside to smoke a cigarette, her body humming from the alcohol. Under the short awning, she lit a cigarette and leaned back against the building, which was slick with humidity despite the cover. Another woman propped up against the wall leaned toward Eve.

“Do you have a light?” she asked. Her accent was American, and Eve turned toward her with interest as she handed her the lighter. The woman was in her early thirties and was tall, white and thin, with fine brown hair that fell past her shoulders. She had large, dark brown eyes set in a narrow face that reminded Eve of a beautiful doe. She was dressed in dark jeans and a pale leather jacket.

The woman lit her cigarette and blinked thick, long lashes as she exhaled. Eve felt a thrill.

“Whose birthday is it?” The woman asked as she handed the lighter back.

“Excuse me?”

“I heard your table talking about birthdays earlier,” the woman shrugged. “Is it yours?”

Eve hesitated. The rule was that no one talked about Villanelle in public.  _ We don’t say her name, we don’t reference her, we don’t recall her, she doesn’t exist _ , Eve recited in her head. They had maybe been a little lax tonight.

“My coworker,” Eve answered only a beat later, the pause covered by her cigarette.

The woman did not turn away from her. Eve noticed the body language and suddenly longed for Villanelle. She imagined how delighted and amused Villanelle would be to watch a woman hit on Eve, the gnawing sex they would have afterward, the animal smell of sweat in the armpit of your lover. Eve’s hand slipped into the pocket of her rain jacket to run a thumb across the postcard tucked inside.

“Can I buy you a drink?” the woman asked, her long fingers sliding behind her ear to tuck her fine hair out of her face. She smiled—white, straight, American teeth. An open and trusting face.

Eve’s eyes flicked away. This had happened to her several times in the past month; it was strange. Maybe it was the perfume that she wore now, tiny dabs under her ears to preserve the earthy scent. She wondered what it smelled like to others. She recalled the first time she had smelled it on Villanelle—pinned to the seats of the bus awkwardly, her back and bad shoulder screaming in pain, blood rushing heavily to her head where it hung into the aisle. Her first panicked instinct had been to bite Villanelle, hard, wherever she could find bare skin. She had wanted Villanelle to recoil, to release the terrible pressure. But that first breath, a steadying gasp, had felt like drowning in a bitter and intoxicating scent. It had reached inside her and uncoiled her.

“Maybe next time,” she finally answered, throwing the rest of her cigarette into the wet stream that ran under the curb in front of them. Loud rivulets of rain streamed from the side of the awning onto the pavement next to Eve’s feet, splattering her.

Eve lay on her stomach in bed, the side of her right cheek pressed into her pillow, staring into the grainy darkness. She should be exhausted—and she was; there was a tightness next to her eyes and a dull ache in the back of her neck—but her brain would not wind down because she could not stop thinking about Villanelle. Where was she? When would Eve see her again? Her left hand was in the pillowcase, almost under her cheek, where she had stowed the postcard. Although she had already done this several times, she pulled the postcard out again and held it to her nose to inhale it. It smelled of nothing. It smelled of paper.

Eve squirmed under the sheets in frustration.

Villanelle always did this. She showed up unexpectedly and flipped Eve open like Eve was an overturned stone, her insides the muddy bottom of the rock alive with insects, exposed. 

_ Don’t make piroshki without me _ .

She let her mind run over the sentence, so simple and yet carefully crafted. Villanelle had chosen something that only she and Eve would understand. Incredible how five words could yank out the memories of that afternoon almost the way that a snatch of a song or a poem can: Villanelle standing in the cramped kitchen with her hands covered in a crust of drying dough, the insistent shine of her large eyes, the way that a loose strand of blonde hair clung to the corner of her eye where she could not brush it away with sticky hands. And Eve had been there too—it was not an abstract, not a painting—Eve had been there, and been free to touch, to grasp.

Her breath came short and a lump formed in her throat at the memory of what seemed so easy at the time, the way she had slid her hand into the tight front of Villanelle’s jeans and the way they had both been trapped there, then. The sharp ache in Eve’s wrist as her hand started to lose circulation where the denim cut into her forearm, and the twin phantom ache in her chest when Villanelle had made a noise through her nose that had cut through Eve’s pain like a beam of light and made it so that she could go on.

Eve was touching herself, now; she couldn’t help it. Even the memory of Villanelle, wet against the underside of Eve’s numb fingers, was making her wet, too. Villanelle’s hands had been pressed to the countertop on either side of Eve, her fingers splayed and her nails going white as she pressed down. She had tried to move her hands toward Eve, and Eve had said,  _ No _ , had relished in the forceful clarity of the command, had let her head swim with the soft pant that Villanelle let out when Eve had said the word.

Eve’s hand had moved faster (was moving faster) and she had turned her face where her cheek had been pressed into Villanelle’s and gently dragged her bottom lip against the soft lobe of Villanelle’s ear, so that Villanelle had said,  _ Eve – let me touch you,  _ and Eve had simply said again,  _ No _ , and bit the lobe of Villanelle’s ear, drawing out a gasp.

Eve moaned, her left hand still clutching the post card and her right hand trapped between her thighs and the mattress, beginning to lose feeling just as it had that afternoon in the kitchen in Prague. She remembered the way Villanelle had come that day, the brief crying out, the way her cheek had turned hot next to Eve’s, and Eve thought of this over and over again—the choked cry, the surge of Villanelle’s hips, the numb fingers, the feeling in Eve’s own stomach—until Eve came against her own hand too, tightly and inevitably, her eyes screwed shut, remembering Villanelle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No chapter next week since it's KE Week, but - I am posting a ficlet for AU day so look out for that :)


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